Greek government formation, May

Speaking to members of his ruling SYRIZA party's central committee Sunday, Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras laid out the party's strategy in the runup to May's elections for the European Parliament.

In what was seen as a tactical maneuver, Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras said on Wednesday that he will back incumbent President Prokopis Pavlopoulos in 2020 and called on New Democracy to do the same. 

Tsipras announced his intention to back Pavlopoulos for a second term during the debate in Parliament on the constitutional review. 

Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras has been implementing his re-election strategy to the letter over the past six months, steering Greece out of a humiliating bailout and resolving a decades-old dispute with the neighboring Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia.

Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras has called on the EU to "do all it can to support" Turkey which is currently hosting 4 million refugees.

Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras is seriously thinking about accepting into the Syriza Parliamentary group those independent deputies who have been helping his government pass important legislation, after former partner Panos Kammenos and his Independent Greeks party bolted the coalition.

With the four-year partnership between leftist SYRIZA and nationalist Independent Greeks (ANEL) looking like it may be heading to an end over the name deal with the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM), pundits are scrambling to forecast the exact date and whether it will be a velvet divorce or an acrimonious breakup.

A 27-year name row between Greece and Macedonia cannot be resolved without constitutional revision in the neighboring country, Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras said on May 19 amid hopes for a June deal.

Former French president Francois Hollande claims in his new book, "Lessons on Power," that he told Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras after the referendum in the summer of 2015 that "you won, but Greece lost."

Hollande said that after Greeks rejected a fresh round of austerity, he told Tsipras that those in the EU that favored a Greek exit from the euro were only emboldened.

The government will make every possible effort to accelerate the release of the two Greek soldiers detained on Turkish territory in March, alternate Defense Minister Fotis Kouvelis said Friday.

"The Macedonian nation has never existed," Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras said in an interview with the Ethnos newspaper quoted by the News 24/7 portal and Nova TV. The interview of Tsipras will be published on Sunday.